Page 50 of The Hopeless Romantic’s Guide to Enchantment

Persistence didn’t seem to be Miss Penworthy’s best quality. She’d already moved from prostrate to kneeling and frankly her knees were beginning to complain. “Would anybody mind if I stopped abasing myself now? I’m getting a bit tired of it.”

I gave the Troll Queen the closest my kind can muster to a sympathetic look. Which is to say a look of slightly muted schadenfreude. “Frustrating, aren’t they?”

Ignoring me, the Troll Queen scowled at Miss Penworthy in a doomed – at least if I was going to have anything to say about it – effort to get the whole thing back on script. “If you give me that golden apple,” she said through gritted teeth, “I will grant you one night with—”

She was interrupted by a crash from the other side of the hall. A large statue of what in a mortal castle would have been one of her ancestors but in an immortal one was better thought of as one of her other aspects, selves, or manifestations, had just toppled over completely by itself with no external assistance from anybody working to a deadline.

“Treachery,” cried the Troll Queen. You have to cry treachery in such a situation, it’s the law. “Guards, seize the girls and the hobgoblin.”

With a presence of mind built over several adventures in otherworlds and an excessive diet of light novels, Miss Bickle swept up the golden apple and, like Eris crashing a party, threw it hard at the Troll Queen. It wasn’t, I’ll admit, the most effective of attacks, the apple bouncing off the queen’s shoulder and dropping to the floor at her feet. But between that and the totally coincidental statue collapse, there was enough of a distraction. “Erica! Go!”

From my position near the statue that I had been coincidentally close to, I transformed into a swallow and followed Miss Penworthy as she dashed for the exit. A troll tried to catch hold of her as she fled but she took the golden comb she’d been given by the second old woman and raked it hard down the monster’s arm. It released her, and she ran.

* * *

Miss Penworthy made her way cautiously through the Troll Queen’s castle. And although there were many wonders, delights and distractions that might have delayed her on the way, she ignored them all and went with the unerring instinct of pigeons, lovers, and fairytale heroines, up the stairs of the tallest tower to the room where her princess was imprisoned.

She was not chained. Chains would, in any case, have been unlikely to hold her in bear shape. She was sitting glumly at the foot of the bed, looking longingly out of the window.

“Princess!” cried Miss Penworthy, who had grown rather used to her lover not having a name per se. “I’m here to rescue you!”

The Bear Princess turned a melancholy head towards her. She blinked, but said nothing.

“I said, I’m here to rescue you.”

But the Bear Princess shook her great head and said, “No.”

It wasn’t the answer Miss Penworthy had been hoping for. Or expecting. “What do you mean, no?”

“Nothing has changed. I am still cursed. I am still promised to the Troll Queen. Your being here only makes things worse.”

Fearing that the trolls were close behind her, Miss Penworthy approached the Bear Princess, took tight hold of her fur, and made a spirited effort to pull her out of the door. This failed spectacularly. Because bear. “Come on,” she insisted. “You don’t have to stay anywhere you don’t want to.”

“I do,” replied the Bear Princess. “When you brought the candle to my room, you proved that love is not blind and that—”

She was interrupted by Miss Penworthy shrieking, “Stop it.”

The Bear Princess, unlike most royals, actually stopped it.

“I am so tired,” Miss Penworthy went on, somehow managing to sound weary and passionate at once, “of rules. My father’s rules. Society’s rules. The silly story-rules that Lizzie is so fond of and that you seem to live by. Why can’t we just… why can’t we just say fuck it?”

The Bear Princess gazed up into Miss Penworthy’s eyes. “Fuck it?”

Letting go of her wife’s fur, Miss Penworthy nodded. “Yes. Fuck it. Fuck curses and trolls and who we’re meant to love and who we’re meant to marry. Fuck symbols and rituals and having to leave me because I crossed a line you couldn’t even tell me about. Let’s just go. Let’s just be happy.”

“I will still be a bear,” the Bear Princess pointed out. “By day, at least.”

To which Miss Penworthy replied, “So?”

“You cannot wish to be married to a beast.”

“Princess” – to weary and passionate, Miss Penworthy’s voice now added ‘scolding’ – “don’t tell me what I can and can’t wish.” And then, because it felt very much like the thing to do, she knelt in front of the Bear Princess, gazed up at her, and said, “I love you. I love you no matter what shape or what skin you’re wearing. If you want to stop being a bear because you don’t like being a bear, then that’s fine. But if it’s about me, well…” – she folded her arms across her bosom in a gesture I was sure she’d learned from Miss Bickle – “I’ll thank you to trust that I know my own mind.”

With timing that I would have thought was implausible had I not witnessed it instead of making it up, two large trolls burst through the door at the most dramatic possible moment.

What followed was… violent. As with sex, violence bores me more than it thrills me, so I won’t give a blow-by-blow account of the struggle that followed (especially since I’m already over wordcount). I’ll only say that in a fight, you should always bet on the enchanted bear.

With Miss Penworthy on her back, the Bear Princess fought her way through the castle to the throne room, where Miss Bickle, with characteristic insensibility to danger, was doing her best to defend herself with a golden spindle.